Comment

This is taken from the top of the northern side of the Frigidarium, whose walls Towne must have climbed for the view. It looks down and left into the Natatio (the olympic swimming pool) and beyond, to the Alban Hills south-east of Rome. Interest in the Baths of Caracalla increased in the late 1770s when permission for excavations was granted to Giovanni Volpato. Other artists who drew the site, both in 1780–81, were Louis Ducros and Giovanni Lusieri; John “Warwick” Smith also drew the Baths (British Museum), using the same viewpoint as Towne.

This and the next drawing of Caracalla (FT203) were among the very last of Towne’s drawings of Rome to be mounted; both share the same mounting materials and decoration, which in the case of FT203 is watermarked with the date 1811. Their treatment as a pair, as well as affinities between the images themselves (they share the same viewpoint and describe adjacent parts of the site), suggest that they may well have been conceived as a single panoramic view. However, although it was not unknown for Towne to work during both the morning and afternoon on a single drawing (for example, see FT233), Towne has cast the shadows here in two directions, making it obvious that FT203 was drawn in the morning and FT202 in the afternoon. In so doing he has denied the view the unique source of light that it would have required in order to work as a panoramic view.